A Closer Look
Zotac chose black on black with more black for the Premium Edition packaging. There's not a lot of information on the box, aside from some generic sequential performance specifications and a mention of the three-year warranty.
The Premium Edition SSDs use a 7mm-tall, 2.5-inch enclosure that fits in newer notebooks requiring the low-profile design. The case is made from a thin, stamped metal, so it doesn't perform well as a heat sink. We've yet to push an S10-controlled drive to its throttle point though, so this shouldn't be a concern.
If you follow our storage coverage, then you've already seen this PCB on a few occasions. Phison makes most, if not all of the drives that are turned over to partners, which then become retail products. That's why nearly all of the S10-based drives are identical. There are, however, a few different PCB revisions to accommodate various types of flash. Zotac's Premium Edition SSDs use NAND packaged from wafers outside of Toshiba (we were told the Premium Edition uses Toshiba 19nm dies; companies buy the flash at the wafer level, then bin and sort for different products).
